There
are two divisional seminars this week and next. Tomorrow (Thursday,
April 1) at 11 a.m. in VWF 102, U.S. Representative Vernon Ehlers of Grand Rapids will
present the address “The Next Hundred Years of Science: It’s All About the
Students.”

Ehlers’s presentation will be informed not only by his tenure in both the
state and federal legislature—where his emphases include K-12 science education--but
also by his background as the first research physicist to serve in Congress.
He holds a doctorate in nuclear physics and taught and conducted research
at both the University of California at Berkeley and Calvin College for
several years.

Next week Thursday (April 8) at 11 a.m. in Winants Auditorium in Graves Hall,
Dr. Cora Marrett, Deputy Director of the National Science
Foundation, will present the final keynote address for Centennial Year Celebration
for Hope's Natural and Applied Science Division.

Abstract: We will explore how a team of mathematics and engineering
faculty here at Hope could not resist a deal to earn $100 for solving 10
math problems in a competition with teams from all over the world in the
100-Dollar 100-Digit Challenge. Most of the problems
are stated simply and involve integration, matrix calculations, minimization,
probability, or geometry. We will look at a few of the problems and
their solutions as well as discuss problem solving in general.

The Undergraduate
Research Celebration

This year's Celebration
of Undergraduate Research & Creative Performance will be held Friday
April 9, 2:30-4:30 p.m. in the DeVos field house. This year there
will be 211 presentations representing 351 students and 112 faculty. There
will be a number of poster presentations from mathematics students. This
is a great opportunity to see the different types of research conducted by
Hope students.

Zach Mitchell is shown here from last year's
celebration with his poster titled “Turning out the Lights.” He, along
with Kathryn Johnson, studied a
generalization of the game Lights Out and used graph theory to determine
which graphs in certain families were winnable.

Weird Math in
the News

While Hope professors
were slaving away at trying to earn $100 by solving 10 problems (see above
colloquium announcement) Gregori Perelman was at work solving a the Poincaré Conjecture. Proving this conjecture was among
the Clay Mathematics Institute's Millennium Prize
Problems and doing so would earn a person $1,000,000.

Perelman developed a proof for this conjecture. In 2006 he was awarded
the Fields Medal in mathematics, which he refused. Last week it was
announced that he would receive the Millennium Prize and $1,000,000 that
went with it. It appears as though he is again refusing that award. For
more on this story, click here.

Spring Social
Event

A good time was
had by all at the recent Mathematics Spring Social Event. Students and
faculty enjoyed playing a variety of games, eating pizza, and each other's
company.

The event concluded with a pieing of
Prof. Chuck Cusak. Although he was the third runner up in the voting,
the top three were not available. It was noted that there was a can
of whipped cream left over from the event, so perhaps one or more of the top
vote getters may still get their just "desserts!"

Math Club News

Math club would like to extend a big thank you to all who participated in
the social event, and especially to those who contributed to the pie-in-the-face
contest. We raised right around $32. We have decided to donate this money
to Haiti relief through the Red Cross.

In other news, we will not have a meeting this week, but we will have one
next week, Thursday April 8th at 7:00 in VZN 298. Happy Spring!

Tintle wins
award

Dr. Nathan Tintle recently received the "Dean's Science Division Faculty
Promise for Excellence in Research Award." Prof. Tintle is engaged
in statistics genetics research. His current projects include innovations
in the design and analysis of genome-wide association; an interdisciplinary
effort to extend the capability of the RAST (Rapid Annotation using Subsystems
Technology) genome analysis service; and innovations to the curriculum of
the college's statistics courses.

Professor Pennings and Elvis
took their dog and pony show on the road this past spring break to Virginia.
They visited Roanoke College, Davidson College, the University of Virginia,
James Madison University and the Greater Richmond Council of Teachers of
Mathematics Spring Conference. Just as in previous years, they created
some media attention. Visit the following two links to see Tim and
Elvis in action.

In the movie Good Will
Hunting, Matt Damon's character, Will Hunting, is a janitor at MIT. He
solves a difficult graduate-level mathematics problem that is left of the
chalk board in a room he is cleaning.

This story was most likely inspired by the real-life event in which a student
showed up late for class. There were three problems written on the
board and the student assumed that they were all part of his test.
He solved them all and turned in his paper. As it turns out,
the first two were test questions and the third was an example of an unsolved
problem in mathematics. The student's name was George
Dantzig (pictured on the right). To read more about this story
click here.

TI-Nspire Workshop

Texas Instruments is offering a 3-day TI-Nspire summer workshops around the
country for pre-service mathematics teachers You must be planning
to graduate by the summer of 2011. The cost of the workshop is $25
and all attendees will receive a TI-Nspire handheld with Touchpad and TI-Nspire
Teacher Software. Click here for more information.

Problem Solvers
of the Fortnight

In our last problem of the fortnight you were asked to determine the UNITS
digit of:

Your sock drawer has 25 electric yellow socks, 30 blue striped socks, 17 orange socks, 13
magnetic socks, 33 pale purple socks,
30 royal red socks, 11 gruesome green socks, 14 midnight black
socks, and 23 bruin brown socks!
If you reach into the drawer in the dark, how many socks do you need
to pull out to be sure you have a matching pair?

Write your solution (not just an
answer) on a pair of socks and drop it off in the official Problem of
the Fortnight slot (or sock drawer) outside Dr. Pearson's office (VWF 212)
by 3:00 p.m. on Friday, April 9. As always, be sure to include your
name, the name(s) of your professor(s), and your math class(es) -- e.g.
Pippi Longstocking, Dr. Barefoot Ted, Math 299 -- on your solution.

Some of the world's greatest feats were accomplished by people not smart
enough to know they were impossible.
Don Larson